Brandy Zadrozny wrote a story for NBC News about how the internet fueled and defeated the Pandemic. Black Oxygen Organics, a company and product that has become a hit among believers in alternative medicine as a miracle treatment for COVID-19, was the subject of a story. I debated about writing about BOO because the story seemed too unbelievable for even me, but then I thought about the fact that antivaxxers had been using a form of bleach solution called the Miracle Mineral Supplement to treat autism. As I will touch on later, MMS is now billed as a treatment for COVID-19.
What is BOO? It is mud, dirt, or whatever you want to call it.
The social media posts started in May with photos and videos of smiling people, mostly women, drinking Mason jars of black liquid, and dipping babies and dogs in black water. They linked to a website that sold a product called Black Oxygen Organics.
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Black Oxygen Organics is not easy to classify. It was marketed as fulvic acid, a compound derived from plants that was dug up from an Ontario peat bog. The end product and smallest particle of the decomposition of ancient, organic matter was advertised on the website of the Canadian company that sold it.
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The dirt is four-and-a-half ounces and is sealed in a black plastic baggie and sold for $110. Visitors to the Black Oxygen Organics website were greeted with a pair of white hands cradling cups of dirt. A gift from the ground. Drink it. Wear it. Bathe in it.
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According to the company, BOO can be taken by anyone at any age, as well as animals, and claims many benefits and uses, including improved brain function and heart health.
Black Oxygen Organics has a mystical origin story for its products.
In Canada, CEO and Formulator,Marc Saint-Onge, did an extensive search for 63 peat bogs. A living source with one of the highest levels of fulvic acid in the world was discovered after years of testing.
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Black Oxygen Organics has the sole right to extract the richest living sources of fulvic minerals in the world, an uncontaminated, fulvic acid-rich peat bog in the Ottawa Valley in Ontario, Canada.
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Black Oxygen Organics developed and owns proprietary harvesting methods and controls every aspect of manufacturing from start to finish. We can provide a better product at a better price and be more generous with our rewards plan because we have no middle formulator.
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Black Oxygen Organics harvests from one of the richest peat bogs on the planet, not far from the home of Marc.
I love a good single malt Scotch, but this is ridiculous. In other words, he describes himself as a total quackery, as a Naturopath, a kinesitherapist, a reiki master, and an aromatherapist. Black Oxygen products are not designed or marketed as having the ability to prevent, cure, treat or cure human disease, and there is a Quack Miranda warning on the website. I will cut to the chase before going into the history. In September, Health Canada announced a recall of Black Oxygen Organics due to potential health risks and promotion of the products in ways that had not been evaluated or authorized. The FDA followed suit around the same time that the company announced that it was closing up shop as it was faced with a class action lawsuit by Georgia residents.
Several BOO sellers took matters into their own hands after an anti-MLM activist noticed that the BOO product appeared to share a border with a landfill.
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NBC News viewed the results of three of the tests and they showed elevated levels of lead and arsenic.
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The results are the basis of a federal lawsuit filed in Georgia. The complaint was filed on behalf of four Georgia residents who purchased BOO, which was found to have dangerously high levels of toxic heavy metals.
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Two of the scientists confirmed that only two of the BOO served exceeded Health Canada's daily limits for lead and arsenic, and three of the BOO served exceeded daily arsenic limits. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration does not have the same guidelines.
Batman has traditional Chinese medicine herbal remedies. It does make me wonder how those who are committed to natural remedies can be so fond of treatments that have the potential to cause harm. There is something poetic about the idea of a cure for everything that ails you, including COVID-19, that comes from a peat bog that abuts a landfill. This observation is a metaphor for so much of alternative medicine.
The claims for BOO made by the company are what we will look at first.
The science of BOO.
What does fulvic acid do? For those with a chemistry background, this is the chemical structure.
Those with organic chemistry background can see that it is a polyphenolic acid. There are more than one type of fulvic acid, but there is no need to go into much detail. This aspect of fulvic acid and similar compounds was described in a recent study by a group of scientists in China.
The majority of natural organic matter in soils is comprised of humic substances. The electron transfer capacity of soil is dependent on the number of functional groups in their structure. It's not clear if agricultural land-use types can affect the soil's environment. We evaluated the responses of soil humic acids and fulvic acids to different agricultural land-use types. The results show that tomato soil, cabbage soil, grapevine soil, and myrica rubra soil have the highest ETCs. Agricultural land-use types can affect the transformation and decomposition of HS in soils.
Fulvic acids can be important in agriculture, but what about humans? An article written before the swine flue was about fulvic acids.
There is a disease called hay fever.
Eczema is a skin disease.
Alzheimer's disease.
There is cancer.
There is fatigue.
There is lead toxicity.
There is an inflammation of the airways.
I searched the site to see how many times we have mentioned fulvic acid. I came up with only two times, once by the late retired Mark Crislip and once by me more recently.
I used Facebook to find other claims.
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fulvic acid can be used todetox glyphosate.
A number of private groups claim that fulvic acid is a cure-all.
There is no good evidence that fulvic acid does anything for any of the conditions listed. That didn't stop BOO from selling its goods. I was struck by how much of the rationale for BOO is similar to that of Black Oxygen Organics.
Fulvic acid is the smallest particle of the decomposition of ancient, organic matter. It's just a fancy way of saying that there's organic matter.
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All the vitamins, minerals, anti-oxidants, and genetic coding of everything in that matter can be found in a liquid supplement. It only makes sense to nourish your body with what it is made of, since it is the same as other organisms.
Do you think you can see the homeopathy vibe? The fulvic acid from the decomposing matter in the peat bog has a memory of all the nutrition information, anti-oxidant capacity and genetic coding of everything that produced it. The idea behind homeopathy is that the water used to suck the original compounds from the remedy retains a memory of it. I am not claiming that this is a form of medicine. I am pointing out how similar themes stay the same through all of alternative medicine. The Law of Contagion suggests that once things have come in contact, they retain some sort of relationship with each other.
Frank Stubenvoll is a certified teacher in the field of mitochondria therapy and Kirlian diagnosis, and he is also a detoxification expert. His paper is a masterpiece of pseudoscience, as the Kirlian diagnosis was used to make the claim. Kirlian photography is a photographic technique that is supposed to show a person's "energy" or "aura." If you don't remember or don't know what that is, Kirlian diagnosis involves doing something called Kirlian photography, which is basically a photographic technique that shows A person's hand is placed on a photographic emulsion within an apparatus that produces a high-voltage and low-amperage. A fuzzy glow surrounds the outline of the object. Proponents claim that these patterns are linked to the Chinese medicine of acupuncture and that it shows changes in health and emotional state.
Proponents claim that these patterns show changes in health and emotional state. Kirlian photography can be used to demonstrate changes before and after the manipulation of the spine. Kirlian effects depend on physical factors that are understood.
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Kirlian photography is said to detect all types of disease and emotional states. It is still used by many energy healers,clairvoyants, and other occult practitioners. People are said to be naturally gifted. The outcome depends on a number of factors, including the film type, the voltage, the skin resistance, the room temperature, and the exposure time.
There is an endorsement of fulvic acid and BOO as a therapy for heavy metals that you will absorb from the BOO mud itself.
BOO claims that its products have anti-oxidant properties, using bizarre chemistry to justify the claims.
Fulvic acid can easily move into cells due to its size. It carries up to sixty times its weight in nutrition into the cell.
The biochemist in me from my time as a chemistry major, graduate student, and medical student keeps asking how this work. What does this mean?
This too.
Toxic by-products of free radicals cause cellular damage. Each cell in your body can be hit by up to 10,000 free radicals per day and they need to be destroyed in order to not cause harm. Each free radical needs an electron to be neutralized.
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Fourteen trillion electrons can be donated by one molecule of fulvic acid. That is twenty-one zeros. It has the ability to react with both negatively and positively charged unpaired electrons, rendering free radicals harmless. It can change the mineral to new compounds or eliminate them as waste.
It is true that free radicals can do this, but what are they? A free radical is an atom, molecule, or ion with at least one unpaired electron. The unpaired electrons make the radical highly reactive, which is why they can oxidize surrounding molecule by grabbing elections from them. Free radicals can produce something called "reactive oxygen species," commonly abbreviated ROS, which is why they often contain oxygen. I realize that is simple, but hopefully not simplistic. Here is a diagram.
Dan Cojocari's own work is in the CC BY-SA 4.0.
There is a balance between the free radicals that are used by the body in a number of processes and the ones that are not. When that balance is disrupted in favor of oxidants like free radicals, that is called oxidative stress, and ROS can lead to damage to surrounding genes.
The biochemist in me wondered a few things. I assume that the term "tera-trillion" came from combining the SI prefix "tera" with the number " trillion" to come up with 1021, so why did BOO use it? The obvious answer is that it sounds more impressive than Zetta, which is the correct SI prefix to use. I wondered how a single molecule of fulvic acid could give 14 x 1021 electrons. I like to call it chemical babble, a term I like to use based on a famous term from Star Trek known as "technobabble," which is a term that what writers and fans use to mean very impressive scientific-sounding verbiage used in the show that actually doesn't. A single molecule of fulvic acid can give 1/100 of a mole of electrons. The entire idea is ludicrous, but perhaps my chemistry is rusty. If you assume that a single molecule of fulvic acid can donate these electrons over time, then why can't it do so indefinitely?
Black Oxygen Organics marketed several products, including BlackOxygen Tabs and BlackOxygen Powder, that claimed to be pure fulvic with a recommended dose. The company marketed BlackOxygen Coffee because they wanted to make a cup of mud into a description of my coffee.
What about COVID19?
BOO and COVID-19
For a long time, alternative medicine practitioners have promoted fulvic acid as the "natural cure" for almost everything because they don't want you to know about it. How did we get there? If there is one principle of alternative medicine, it is that remedies that work for some things will almost always be trotted out to treat any new disease that comes along, and, boy, did COVID-19 come along in a big way.
By the end of the summer, online ads for BOO had made their way to millions of people within the internet communities that embrace fringe supplements, anti-vaccine and Covid-denier groups, and finally more general alternative health and fake cure.
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People seemed to be buying; parts of TikTok andInstagram were flooded with #BOO posts. According to videos of company meetings viewed by NBC News, the businessman behind Black Oxygen Organics has been selling mud in various forms for 25 years, but BOO sold in amounts that surprised even its own executives.
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The stars were aligned for it. Wonder cures have been revived because of the Pandemic marked by unprecedented and politicized misinformation. An audience and eager customer base for a new kind of medicine show were provided by well- connected Facebook groups of alternative health seekers and vaccine skeptics. Many women are dipping their toes into the often unprofitable world of multilevel marketing for the first time after reading too-good-to-be-true testimonials posted to social media.
What kind of science was being used to support this claim? Here is one example.
The claim is that humic acids are anti-viral. It is based on cherry picked and misinterpreted science, including studies that show humic acids to be effective against a wide range of viruses. There is only one study in rabbits that used humic acids in the eye along with the infectious agent, and it was done in the early 1970s. If a virus is applied, that last one is a highly artificial study. There is a link to a website for nutrition information for people who work with chiropractors, acupuncturists, etc.
Black Oxygen Organics was posting testimonials of miracle cures on its social media pages, two of which can be found at truthinadvertising.org here and here.
The testimonials are listed in the NBC News report.
One person in a 27,000-member private Facebook group posted, "Who would have thought drinking dirt would make me feel so good?"
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A user posted a photo of a baby in a bathtub with a deep caramel color. The baby had contracted hand, foot and mouth disease, a disease that affects children and causes painful sores. She wrote that Tiny was enjoying his bath. Our bottom feels better and we are in a better mood.
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There are many posts dedicated to tactics for getting kids and loved ones to take BOO.
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One poster offered to make brownies for the picky family.
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The majority of posts in dozens of Facebook groups are made up of testimonials like these, where BOO is heralded as a miracle drug, with hundreds of thousands of collective members. BOO can cure a lot of diseases, according to teams of sellers in private Facebook groups. BOO proponents say it can be used todetox and protect against Covid-19, and that it also protects against and treats the vaccine.
Unsurprisingly, BOO was a huge scam.
According to the Consumer Awareness Institute, more than 99 percent of multi-level marketers lose money. BOO's business was booming according to social media posts. Women lather BOO on their faces and soak their feet in pasta pots in selfies and videos posted to social media sites.
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Black Oxygen Organics compensation plan is convoluted. According to their company handbook, sellers can earn income in two different ways: through retail commissions on bags of BOO they sell, and through recruiting other sellers, from which they earn additional commission and bonuses. There are 10 titles in the company, from brand partner to director to CEO, with compensation packages growing along the way.
First and foremost, it is always about the grift, so of course there is an MLM involved! The people running Black Oxygen Organics knew that they had created a monster and that their sellers had gone too far.
In September, Montaruli, BOO's vice president, led a corporate call to address the Facebook groups.
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Montaruli said in a call that it was scary, referring to the claims made by some of the BOOs sellers. I have never seen anything like this before. Never.
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These outrageous claims, and I am not even sure if they are bad enough, are attracting the haters, giving them more fuel for the fire, and potential government officials.
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Montaruli told BOO sellers to remove the pages and groups and start over again.
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One slide suggested alternatives for 14 popular BOO uses, which included using terms like ADHD to "trouble concentrating" and "preventing heart attack" to "maintain a healthy cardiovascular system."
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In September, many of the Facebook groups went private, most changed their names from BOO to fulvic acid, and the pinned testimonials from customers claiming miracle cures were wiped clean or edited to remove any liability, as the groups evolved.
grifters will grift. Always. The way supplement hawkers have used the FDA's limitations to hide behind so-called "structure-function" claims has always been done to avoid the FDA.
All quackery is possible when there is no science.
It's not unusual for belief to be fused with grift when it comes to medicine that is unscientific, pseudoscientific, or roots in superstition. There is a belief that a product does all these miraculous things, but there is also a lot of grift involved. It only took a few weeks after the Pandemic hit to start promoting this form of bleach as a treatment for many diseases and conditions. Indeed, Kerri Rivera, who made a lot of noise in theautism circles by advocating giving bleach and enemas to children withautism, jumped on the COVID-19 quackery bandwagon. As early as March 2020, I noted that COVID-19 has been a golden opportunity for quacks, with Steve Gavura producing an incomplete list as early as May 2020 that included traditional Chinese medicine, homeopathy, and several others.
We can now add magic dirt from a landfill next to that list. It doesn't make a difference if it's peat bog or not that single malt Scotch Whiskey would reject it as not being good enough for their products. It is natural and the Pandemic gives all sorts of opportunities. That is enough.
